Our everyday war (15th of April 2011)

Is there, for each person, some event that particularly marks the life? Something that is the reason we became the way we are, something that we can remember in the situations when we do not know what to do, something that forms the worldview, character, the features by which our surrounding recognizes us? If I had to answer to this question from my experience, I would say that there is no a single event, a particular action or a period in my life that defined me. Still, there are three or four important things that I often recall. They are mostly events in which I did a completely wrong thing and which I often remember as some ugly scar that shows up when shaving. One nice thing that belongs to this category is certainly "The Myth of Sisyphus" by Albert Camus. That is the book that importantly defined my direction.

But my ugly memories and dear influential literature are small effects on the scale of event that defined the life of Kurt Vonnegut: Second World War. Vonnegut had a misfortune (or fortune?) to, as an American soldier, end up as a war prisoner. He had a misfortune (or fortune?) to witness allied bombing of Dresden, to survive it hidden in a slaughterhouse, and then, together with his war buddies, imprisoned as him, gather and burn on the streets of Dresden corpses of mostly German civilians. To many of them life changed completely after that. It was partly also because in those times life looked to them completely miserable, meaningless and cheap.

War is a big ugliness, it brings enormous suffering, and it enables the biggest human trash to emerge on the surface of history. All of us who have been in places where there was a war know it, and that is a universal characteristic of war. War pollutes space and time and its influence decays slowly in the years that come after it. Even when the war is long over, it still burdens people and space in indirect ways - suffering and evil mark the space and people that live in it. It is the effect of connectedness. Suffering of one person is a suffering of a whole mankind, and it sometimes materializes. I have heard stories told by serious people that something can be felt, some extraordinary discomfort, sorrow, at the places of suffering.

And Vonnegut is a medium of war suffering and blackness. He is the man who has been there and who got marked by it forever. So it is not strange that he returned to all that at the end of his life. Because the book "Armageddon in retrospect" is a book mostly about war. Although, war appears there in strangest combinations: from simulated war in the future where time travel is possible, to war that happened in an invented history that never happened (Americans that wage (and) win a war against Russians in Czechoslovakia during the cold war period). But regardless of all the variations, it is always the same war. Our everyday war. And ugly one.

"Armageddon in retrospect" consists of 11 short stories that were published after Vonneguts death, and the book was edited by his son, also a writer (and a physician) Mark Vonnegut. The stories are not completely "equilibrated", some are better, some worse, but there are couple of them that are particularly strong. To me, the strongest one is the "The Commandant's Desk" because I recognized in it many things that I witnessed myself, and I also recognized by grandfather Šiber in the main character of the story. The story takes place in the Czechoslovakian town of Beda, in an imagined past in which the American soldiers drive out Russians from the town. The main characters are father and daughter (Marta), the town inhabitants, who already witnessed several armies in the town (Nazis, Russian army in the Second World War, Czech communists, and then Russians again). And when they finally got a hope that the things are finally settling down, they realize that the American army is no different from all previous armies. The major cannot stand them, thinks of them as collaborationists and bullies them, and the positive character is the captain who is mentally strong, but also a particularly sensitive type that has difficulties struggling with the war and the situations it creates.

Here is an excerpt from that story (the man who tells the story is the main character (father) who reminded me of my grandfather):

The period when WWII ends and when the American war prisoners get left behind and on their own, expecting the advancement of Russian army, is mentioned in the book several times in different stories. It is perhaps described in a most interesting way in a story "Just You and Me, Sammy" where the plot revolves around an American war prisoner who is in good relations with German soldiers-guards. When the German army retreats, he feels completely lost (by the way, the story has an interesting twist in the end):

A second "story" in the book is Vonnegut's public speech in Clowes Hall, Indianapolis in April 2007. Very lucid, a bit weird, and there is also an interesting comment on science:

The book is very good, although it requires some patience. But it is worth it.

On the image that opened this post, I made a portrait of Rabo Karabekian, completely scared, in a trench. A few metres from us mortar shells were exploding. We survived because I used my wrist teleporter to transport us to an island in Pacific, completely unknown to the world. Palms, little waves, sun and tanned natives who treated us as gods. Much better than trenches !

Last updated on 15th of April 2011.